According to The OSDev Wiki "Any recent version of QEMU with a recent version of OVMF will be sufficient to run a UEFI application". Nice. How do we set this up on a Windows host? Download a QEMU Windows build from https://qemu.weilnetz.de/w64/ (direct link to the latest version as of the writing of this: https://qemu.weilnetz.de/w64/2020/qemu-w64-setup-20200814.exe … Continue reading OS Dev with QEMU, OVMF, and GDB on Windows →

TL;DR: "with exports" means the project starts with some example exports added. You'll need exports, so why not let it insert some boilerplate code for you? Less chance of typos. Use "dynamic-link library" instead of "dynamic-link library with exports" if you want to add '__declspec' to things yourself. So you want to create a DLL … Continue reading Difference between “dynamic-link library with exports” and “dynamic-link library” in Visual Studio →

I just started hacking on an application using the Microsoft Foundation Class library. There are a lot of options in the "new project" wizard, but they don't show you what any of the options mean. So here are some screenshots of the settings, and the result (this is mostly for my own future reference):

I stumbled across a 3-episode podcast (really 2 and a quarter because the second audio file is cut short) relating to an ancient 3D game graphics engine from 2008: http://egtpm.blogspot.com/2009/06/20080605egtpodcst-e3.html It's interesting to hear these folks talking about the future features of their game engine. Little did they know dark times were waiting in the … Continue reading An Ancient Game Engine Time Capsule →

This graph shows all .com domains registered since Feb 1st that start with the word "virus": domainsDownload Interestingly enough it fairly closely matches Google Trends data:

I love Sublime Text, but I can feel the death by a thousand paper cuts beginning. After a product has been on the market for long enough, the people developing it tend to stop caring about the user experience. Today I wanted to stop Sublime Text from zooming in any time I accidentally held down … Continue reading To use our product, just create a config file in an obscure directory →

The wishbone bus is an open-specification for a hardware protocol for connecting two hardware devices. These could be CPUs, RAMs, GPUs, USB controllers, whatever. It was created out of necessity by the open-source-hardware community, since the existing bus protocol standards are all locked down with patents, copyright, and trademarks. It seems to me that a … Continue reading Wishbone Bus →

I've been looking at various open-source RISC-V cores to hook up to the 2D sprite renderer I've been working on, and it looks like Rocket Chip is the way to go, since it's so highly-configurable. That's perfect for me, because game system cores have always been highly custom. Let's see what it takes to build … Continue reading Let’s Build a Rocket Chip →

I've been following Will Green's excellent FPGA VGA Graphics in Verilog series, wherein he creates a VGA output block in Verilog, and displays some sprites on the screen. I wanted to do away with the need for physical hardware, and simulate the VGA generator entirely (I gotta have my end-to-end testing!) using Icarus Verilog. So … Continue reading Capturing frames from a simulated HDL VGA generator →